Long Term Evolution

The 3GPP™ radio interface, UTRA (Universal Terrestrial Radio Access), with the enhancements provided by High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), for both downlink and uplink, will remain highly competitive for several years. Nevertheless, the industry that has developed the 3GPP™ technologies is anxious to ensure the continued competitiveness of those technologies and has launched a Long Term Evolution project within 3GPP.

The focus of the LTE project is on:

enhancement of the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA)

optimization of the UTRAN architecture.

A parallel activity is taking place on the evolution of the 3GPP™ System Architecture (SAE).

A more complete summary of the LTE and SAE programmes can be found on the 3GPP™ website.

ETSI TR 125 913 collects together all the agreed requirements for the Evolved UTRA & UTRAN.

In response to these requirements, various radio technologies were considered but the conclusion was that the downlink would use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and the uplink would use Single Carrier - Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA). Supported downlink data-modulation schemes are QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM, whilst the possible uplink data-modulation schemes are BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK and 16QAM.